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Saturday, June 14, 2008

Blanched Chinese Flowering Cabbage

You might notice that I cook my vegetables by blanching them. They usually turn out looking nicer then stir fried. I never really like to stir frying leafy vegetables. Maybe I don't have the skills. ;p

They are always either over or under cooked. Sometimes, part of the veggie is cooked but another part under cooked. Plus, I hate how the dish of veggies always looked so 'messy'. :P

After a few times of unsuccessful stir-frying of veggies, I turned to blanching them and have stick to that method till now. Except now, on lazy days, I turned to use my Sharp Water Oven. My veggies always comes out perfect, if not tastier.

This Chinese Flowering Cabbage or Cai Xin 菜心 as we commonly call it, is cooked on less lazy day, ie, blanching method. :P This is really easy and fast to do, plus you have a dish of nicely cooked veggies too.

Just add a teaspoon of salt and half a tablespoon of oil in a pot of water enough to cover the vegetable to boil. Once the water is boiling, put the stems of the Cai Xin 菜心 in first. If you, like me prefer not to cut your Cai Xin 菜心 in sections, let them 'stand' with the stems in hot water. You hold on to the leaves, with gloves lah. After 2 minutes, turn off the heat and submerge the whole vegetables in the hot water for another minute. If you like your Cai Xin 菜心 to be softer, then let it cook with the heat on.

Now, here's the trick. If you are adding the Cai Xin 菜心 to further stir-frying later, like adding some mushroom with sauce, when your family are all home for dinner, then plunge the Cai Xin 菜心 into ice water to stop further cooking. So later when you are ready to complete the dish, you just have to add them to the sauce, stir-fry a little and you are ready to serve it. It helps cut down lots of cooking time, especially if you are a couple more dishes to cook. The best part of this method is that the vegetables still looks very green!

For this particular dish, I just plunged the Cai Xin 菜心 in previously boiled cooled water as I was to serve it in 20 minutes time without further stir-frying. I don't want to serve cold veggies. I just drizzle some light soy sauce and top some dry-fried dried white bait on it for that extra flavour and crunch. And that's done.

2 comments:

Hi WokkingMum: I agree. They do look very good. Thinking about it we did not have any green leafy vegetables for sometime already. Suanne and I will go grocery shopping this morning and will go pick up some of these ... gai lan and show pea tips are my fav. BTW, what is a water oven? I think it makes an excellent blog material and I like to learn about it.RegardsBen

Water Oven uses steam to cook. It can steam, grill, bake, proof, defrost and can also be set as a conventional oven. It promises healthier (food) results, reduced oil and salt. But food still taste good if not better.